You may remember that a few months ago I complained about Acronis True Image 2020. I have since been mostly happy with the software, despite it being still fairly slow when uploading a sizable amount of changed files, such as after shooting a bunch of pictures at home. This would have been significantly more noticeable if we had actually left the country since I started using it, as I usually shoot at least 32GB of new pictures on a trip (and sometimes twice as much), but with lockdown and all, it didn’t really happen.
But, beside for that, the software worked well enough. Backup happened regularly, both on the external drive and the Cloud options, and I felt generally safe with using it. Until a couple of weeks ago, when suddenly it stopped working, and failed with Connection Timeout errors. They didn’t correlate with anything: I did upgrade to Windows 10 20H1, but that was a couple of weeks before, and backups went through fine until then. There was no change in network, there was no change from my ISP, and so on.
So what gives? None of the tools available from Acronis reported errors, ports were not marked as blocked, and I was running the last version of everything. I filed a ticket, was called on the phone by one of their support people who actually seemed to know what he was doing — TeamViewer at hand, he checked once again for connectivity, and once again found that everything is alright, the only thing he found to change was disabling the True Image Mounter service, which is used to get quick access to the image files, and thus is not involved in the backup process. I had to disable tha tone because, years after Microsoft introducing WSL, enabling it breaks WSL filesystem access altogether, so you can’t actually install any Linux distro, change passwords in the ones you already installed, or run apt update on Debian.
This was a week ago. In the meantime support asked me to scan the disks for errors because their system report reported one of the partitions as having issues (if I read their log correctly, that’s one of the recovery images so it’s not at all related to the backup), and the more recent one to give them a Process Monitor log while running the backup. Since they don’t actually give you a list of process to limit to, I ended up having to kill most of the other running application to take the log, as I didn’t want to leak more information that I was required to. It still provided a lot of information I’m not totally comfortable with having provided. And I still have no answer, at the time of writing.
It’s not all here — the way you provide all these details to them is a fairly clunky: you can’t just mail them, or attach them through their web support interface, as even their (compressed) system report is more than 25MB for my system. Instead what they instruct you to do is to take the compressed files and uploaded them through FTP with the username/password pair they provide to you.
Let me repeat that. You upload compressed files, that include at the very least most of the filenames you’re backing up, and possibly even more details of your computer, with FTP. Unencrypted. Not SFTP, not FTPS, not HTTPS. FTP. In 2020.
This is probably the part that makes my blood boil. Acronis has clearly figured out that the easiest way for people to get support is to use something that they can use very quickly. Indeed you can still put an FTP URL In the location bar of your Windows 10 File Explorer, and it will allow you to upload and download files over it. But it does that in a totally unencrypted, plain-text manner. I wonder how much more complicated it would be to use at least FTPS, or to have an inbound-only password-protected file upload system, like Google Drive or Dropbox, after all they are a cloud storage solution provider!
As for myself, I found a temporary workaround waiting for the support folks to figure out what they likely have screwed up on their London datacenter: I’m backing up my Lightroom pictures to the datacenter they provide in Germany. It took three days to complete, but it at least gives me peace of mind that, if something goes horribly wrong, at least the most dear part of my backup is saved somewhere else.
And honestly, using a different backup policy than the rest of the system just for the photos is probably a good idea: I set it to “continuous backup”, because generally speaking it usually stays the same all the time, until I go and prepare another set to publish, then a lot of things change quickly and then nothing until the next time I can do it.
Also, I do have the local backup — that part is still working perfectly fine. I might actually want to use it soon, as I’m of two minds between trying to copy over my main OS drive from a 1TB SSD to a 2TB SSD, and just getting a 2TB SSD, and installing everything anew onto it. If I do go that route, I also will reuse the 1TB SSD onto my NUC instead, which right now is running with half SATA and half NVMe storage.
Conclusions? Well, compared to the Amazon Glacier + FastGlacier (that has not been updated in just over two years now, and still sports a Google+ logo and +1 button!), it’s still good value for money. I’m spending a fraction of what I used to spend with Amazon, and even in the half-broken state it’s backing up more data and has significantly faster access. The fact that you can set different policies for different parts of the backup is also a significant plus. I just wish there was a way to go from a “From Folders to Cloud” backup to a tiered “From Folders to External, plus Cloud” — or maybe I’ll bite the bullet and, if it’s really this broken, just go and re-configure also the Lightroom backup to use the tiered option.
But Acronis, consider cleaning up your support act. It’s 2020, you can’t expect your customers to throw you all their information via unencrypted protocols, for safety’s sake!
Update 2020-06-30: the case is now being escalated to the “development and cloud department” — and if this is at all in the same ballpark as the companies I worked for it means that something is totally messed up in their datacenter connectivity and I’m the first one to notice enough to report to them. We’ll see.
Update 2020-07-16: well, the problem is “solved”. In the sense that after I asked them, they moved my data out of the UK (London) datacenter into the Germany one. Which works fine and has no issues. They also said before they will extend my payment to the month that I didn’t have the backup working. But yeah, turns out that nobody seems to have very clear on their side what was going on, but the UK datacenter just disappeared off my dashboard. I wonder how many had this problem.
